Why write content?

There is so much content on the internet. Why bother to write stuff that others have already written? Even with the vast amount of information on biotech that exists on the internet, it takes me a lot of searching, reading, and messaging to understand the things that I’m writing about. My attempts to write about these topics are intended to help people who are like me - relatively new to biology.

I am part of a number of online communities, and find myself asking questions to folks in those communities on top of all of the research that I’m doing myself, because even after reading the research, there are lots of holes in my knowledge, and things that don’t make sense.

Why copy others’ protocols?

I think the most important part of this is that I always attribute and link back to the original source. But I have noticed a particularly annoying trend in science literature online. There is a ton of literature that is either behind a paywall, or no longer present. For example, in my recent post about Cosmids, I came across a list of protocols that looked great! However, if you visit that link, you will find that every link is dead. Not a single one points to the source that they were originally linking to. And so much of the information I’m looking for seems ephemeral like this.

Durability

There are multiple copies of my blog on various computers, in various systems, and the blog itself is hosted for free on netlify, so I don’t anticipate it going away in my lifetime, though perhaps I’ll have to migrate it another time or two.

Outreach

If you have any more questions about the format of my blog, I love hearing from people, so please feel free to reach out. If you want to know more about a topic, I’m still a noob, but am happy to do the homework on your behalf. Just let me know!

And if things are wrong in my posts, please also let me know. I love learning new stuff!